Established in 1969, Manohar is a publishing house and a bookseller serving individuals and libraries. We export books by mail and have a bookstore at Ansari Road in Delhi.
Manohar initially sold only rare and out of print publications, but soon branched out into local sale/export of new books published in India, and then into publishing of scholarly works under its own imprint.

31 August, 2012

Sanskrit-English
Dictionary: Etymologically and
Philologically Arranged with Special
Reference to Cognate

Indo-European
Languages

By- Sir Monier Monier-Williams

New
Edition, Greatly enlarged and improved with the Collaboration of E. Leumann, C.
Cappeller and Other Scholars

This
classic volume is a reprint of the expanded Clarendon Press edition of 1899
completed by Monier-Williams just before his death.

In
Monier-William’s own words: ‘It has consisted in adding about 60,000 Sanskrit
words to about 120,000—the probable amount of the first edition; in fitting the
new matter into the old according to the same etymological plan; in their
justification by the insertion of reference to the literature and to
authorities; in the accentuation of nearly every Sanskrit word to which accents
are usually applied; in the revision and re-revision of printed proofs; until
at length, after the lapse of more than a quarter of a century since the
publication of the original volume, a virtually new Dictionary is sent forth.’

For
students of Sanskrit, Vedic History and Comparative Philology this is the most
comprehensive and useful Sanskrit-English Dictionary ever compiled.

Sir
Monier Monier-Williams was born at Bomaby in 1819. He was appointed the
Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali and Telugu in 1844 at the East India Company’s
College at Haileybury. In 1860, he was elected the Boden Professor of Sanskrit
at Oxford, a post which he held till his death on 11 April 1899.

The
book constitutes an attempt to construct a profile of migrants from Kerala to
the Gulf region, on the basis of an extensive of survey of return emigrants and
their households. The purpose of this study was to understand the demographic
and socio-economic characteristics of the emigrants at the various stages of
emigration process—prior to emigration, during stay abroad and after return to
Kerala. Another important aspect which is discussed is the costs and returns of
emigration, the working and living conditions of emigrants in the destination
region, the pattern of utilization of remittances back home and the problems of
rehabilitation that the emigrants encounter after return.

While
emigration in large numbers has assuaged the pain of massive unemployment in
Kerala to a significant extent and raised the income levels of thousands of
emigrants’ households by way of remittances, these processes have not led to a
developmental take-off of the Kerala economy. While it is the duty of the
government to help the returned emigrants whose emigration ended up in disaster
and economic ruin (who constitute about one-fifth of the returned emigrants),
the government may not find it justifiable to introduce social welfare programmers
for the rest of them. However, the government may think of organizing welfare
schemes and forming cooperatives of returned emigrants for undertaking
projects, which they will be in a position to fulfill with discipline and
dedication.

K.C.
Zachariah
currently Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Development Studies,
Thiruvananthapuram, was principal demographer at the World Bank, Washington
D.C. Along with Professor S. Irudaya Rajan, Zachariah has conducted two large
scale Kerala migration surveys in 1998 and 2003. He has to his credit several
important books/monographs and articles on Kerala’s Demography.

P.R.
Gopinathan Nair
currently Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Development Studies,
Thiruvananthapuram, was earlier Head of the Department of Economics in the
University of Kerala; National Coordinator, UNDP/Government of India project on
National Strategies for Human Development in India and Programme Advisor, Kerala Research Programme
on Local Level Development financially supported by the Netherlands government.

S.
Irudaya Rajan
is Fellow at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. He is the lead author of the book, India’s
Elderly: Burden or Challenge? Currently, he is coordinating two international projects on ageing—care of the elderly and
healthy ageing.

Reporting the
Partition of Punjab 1947: Press,
Public and other Opinions

By-
Raghuvendra Tanwar

The
study is a novel attempt that chronicles Punjab’s partition while dealing with
‘partition itself’. The narrative weaves disparate local and national events,
taking the reader back to 1947 in dimensions large in numbers and scope. Almost
a day-to-day report of the Punjab through 1947, it restores the human dimension
to a story that was essentially one of acute human misery.

Based
mainly on 15 regional and national newspapers it closely examines the Punjab
and its partition through letters, opinion columns, editorials, classifieds and
photographs. Equal
emphasis is also laid on hitherto unused and unpublished sources; these include
personal diaries, letters, memoirs and notes recorded by observant
contemporaries including civil,
police and military field officers, culled from centers in India and the United
Kingdom.

Tanwar
breaks free of tutored statements of ‘so-called facts’ to provide new
dimensions to crucial issues and events, challenging perceptions that have been
held for long, seeking the ‘little histories’, the ‘local intensities’ the
‘local voices’, side stepping in the process the trend of downsizing,
downplaying the tragedy of Punjab’s partition, a trend which has prevailed as
part of a misplaced obligation to demonstrate oneness in writings on India’s
struggle for freedom.

This
book is exceedingly relevant to our present times, more so in view of the
thawing process of relations between India and Pakistan. It is essential
reading for those with interest in Punjab, both East and West, and colonial
Indian history.

Raghuvendra
Tanwar
is Professor of Modern History at Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra.

29 August, 2012

Om Prakash reveals the central role played by Bengal
in the Dutch East India Company’s activities in India in the seventeenth and
early eighteenth century and the resulting integration of India into the world
economy. By the early 1700s, Bengal provided almost 40 per cent of value of
Asian goods sent to Holland, and over half of all textiles exported from Asia
by the Company had carried goods from Bengal all over Asia. Drawing on little-
used documents in the General State Archives in The Hague, the author discusses
the place of the Company in Bengal from the beginnings of its trading
operations there in the 1630s until about 1720.

The book clearly demonstrates Bengal’s crucial part
on the development of world trade networks that occurred after the discovery of
the Cape route to the East Indies, and analyses the implications of the
Company’s trade for Bengal’s economy, with special reference to import of
precious metals. It examines not only the role played by Bengal in the
Company’s trading activities but the structure of Indian merchants’ trade, as
well as the system of manufacturing products in the region.

Om
Prakash retired as Professor of Economic History at the
Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He is a foreign fellow of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam and of the Royal
Dutch Academy of Sciences, Haarlem, The Netherlands.

In
recent decades the South Asian subcontinent has seen an often-contentious
nationalistic and rationalistic splintering which sometimes leads to
horrifyingly bloody consequences. In India the process of transforming
conceptual and cultural regions into administrative and political units
continues to this day, with ever-more-refined regional identities becoming the
basis for carving up larger states into smaller ones. For centuries there have
also been many regions in India that provide a framework for people’s cultural
lives without attaining political salience.

This
book presents a multidisciplinary study of the processes through which regions
and
regional consciousness get formed and maintained in India. The fourteen essays
brought together here examine various modes through which people in different
parts of India express, create, and foster a sense of their area as a distinct,
coherent, and significant unit to which they belong in some important way. The
modes examined include language, oral and written literature, festivals,
pilgrimages, everyday rituals, domestic wall-calendars, caste identity, religious
identity, and political movements. The contributors to the volume belong to a wide
variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: linguistics,
literature, folklore, history, religious studies, sociology, and political
science. The regions they discuss range in location from Kerala to Punjab, and
in size from a few square kilometers of the Sringeri area to the whole
Hindi-speaking region of north India, with two essays focusing on a single city
each.

Rajendra
Vora
is Lokmanya Tilak Professor of Politics and Public Administration at the
University of Pune..

Anne
Feldhaus
is Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She has
published more than ten books and twenty articles on the religious history and
geography of Maharashtra.

This
book deals with rural uprisings in the Mughal subas of Agra, Delhi and Ajmer during the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries which left a lasting impact on the polity,
society and economy of the region and played a decisive role in limiting the
fortunes of the Mughal empire.

The
book traces the history of the Jats who were the principal leaders and
constituted the major support base of these revolts.

A
unique but hitherto unnoticed feature of the revolts was the formation of a
multi-caste coalition of zamindars against the Mughal jagirdars in the Braj-Mewat region. The rebels usually took
collective decisions in secret gatherings, shared information among them
through letters and often expressed their hostility by attacking imperial
symbols of power and seats of local administration such as thanas and qasbas. All these modalities of the action of the rebels are
brought out in this study.

The
study shows that by the 1730s the rebels had successfully shaken the imperial
control in the region. The assertion of the power of zamindars found its expression
in the expansion of zamindaris
at every level. The rise of Jat power in the neighbourhood of Agra and Delhi is
an important event of eighteenth-century north Indian politics. This book
brings out the subtle processes through which Jat rebels became rulers.

This
work covers the period of Mughal decline and inchoate formation of post-Mughal
states and contributes to the existing literature on the Mughal crisis in the
seventeenth-eighteenth centuries.

R.P.
Rana
is Reader in the Department of History, University of Delhi.

28 August, 2012

The
relationship between a spiritual master and his disciple (piri-muridi)
becomes important when one witnesses day after day the large numbers of Muslims
and non-Muslims flocking to spiritual masters (pirs) stationed at the
various dargahs of India.

This
work discovers that piri-muridi aims at making the disciple see God in
all things
while very often allowing him to enjoy worldly success. This is achieved
through a lengthy socialization process that spans a period of time ranging
from twelve years to a lifetime. This socialization process is very painful,
and some disciples (murids) run away. Most, however, remain bound to
their pir, by their vow of allegiance to him, the pir’s
friendliness, sympathy, material, magical and psychological assistance, and
when that is not enough, fear of his
magical power.

During
this period the murid learns to fall in love with the pir whom he
strives to see as the representative of God, by observing, serving, and seeing
the pir’s hand in everything that befalls him, and frequently recalling
and concentrating on a mental image of the pir while believing that his
actions are prompted by the pir. Having thus attained union with the pir,
he one day suddenly realizes that the pir is just a curtain or veil that
hides something else—that which he has truly loved all the time in the image of
the pir is God himself.

The
book is a mine of empirical information collected in the Nizamuddin dargah,
showing how a set of beliefs contained in constantly narrated stories and
experiences are used to forge, structure, maintain and further the relationship
between the pir and his murid. It will be
of interest to scholars of Islam, Indian history and sociology, Sufi thought
and the place of religion in the modern world.

Desiderio
Pinto, S.J.
taught at Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth. Presently he is teaching at Vidyajyoti
College of Theology and other institutions of theology in Ranchi, Varanasi and
Calcutta, and is also librarian at Vidyajyoti.

Published
in association with Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo

The
prospect of a nuclear war in South Asia has drawn global attention and concern.
This book studies nuclear risks in the Indo-Pakistani and Sino-Indian contexts
and suggests a wide range of measures by which India, Pakistan and China could
reduce nuclear dangers in
South Asia.

The
author argues that there is a direct link between a war or a near war situation
and nuclear risks. If the India–Pakistan or the Sino-Indian relationships take
a downward turn, three nuclear risks could raise their ugly heads. They
include: the intentional use of nuclear weapons, accidental use of nuclear
weapons and unauthorized use of nuclear weapons. This book shines a powerful
light on the possibility of each of these three nuclear risks in detail.

Choudhury
suggests that improvement in bilateral relations and nuclear risk reduction are
organically linked and in view of the prevailing suspicion, mistrust and
animosity among these three countries, it would be best for India, Pakistan and
China to concentrate first on measures that can be implemented without
requiring any significant changes in their current security policies. If these
measures were implemented, they could lay the foundation for more significant
measures at a later stage.

The
only full-length study and a timely epilogue of latest nuclear dialogues
between India and Pakistan, Nuclear
Risk Reduction Measures in South Asia will be a standard reference not
only for political scientists and strategic analysts, but also for policy
makers, diplomats, journalists, defense personnel and the informed general
reader.

Upendra
Choudhury
is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Aligarh Muslim University,
Aligarh. He has received his Ph.D from CPS/SSS, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi and published more than fifty articles and research papers in India
and abroad. He has also presented papers in several national and international
seminars/conferences.

This
book is a chronological compilation of the author’s diplomatic experiences
when,
during his Foreign Service career, he was involved in seven unconnected
negotiating responsibilities. No other officer was entrusted with comparable
burdens but he acknowledges that they came to him by bureaucratic happenstance.
In the first three—accompanying Nehru to Bhutan (1958), leading the official
team for India-China Boundary talks (1960), negotiating compensation for
Indians expelled by Idi Amins’ Uganda (1975)—he was only a secretatriat
official. During the last four—normalizing relations with Pakistan and
negotiating Salal hydro-electric project on a ‘Pakistani’ river (1976), Farakka
negotiaations with Bangladesh (1977), and separating Trade and Transit with
Nepal (1978)—he was the Foreign Secretary which enabled him to recommend
improvisations to resolve inherited deadlocks. Most negotiations were with
unequal neighbours, which required anticipating the perceptions (and
misperceptions) of the sovereign partners. Suspicions—justified or
exaggerated—of coercion and hegemonism had to be assuaged.

Mehta
also recalls the personalities of select colleagues and negotiating opposite
numbers, the ablest amongst whom was Chang-wen-chin, his Chinese counterpart.
According to Mehta dueling all day intellectually but toasting each other’s
nations after sundown, symbolizes the unique calling of professional diplomacy.

Jagat
S. Mehta
was Foreign Secretary, Government of India, during 1976-79 appointed at a
comparative young age of 53. After retirement, his primary interest has been in
voluntarism for social and economic development. However, he has woven these
with spells in academia. He was an Associate at Harvard Centre for
International Affairs in 1980, Fellow at Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washingtonin
1981 and appointed Tom Slick Distinguished Professor of World Peace in Austin
(Texas) in 1983. His predecessor in this chair included Nobel Laureates Gunnar
and Alva Myrdal.

Nation State by
Accident: The Politicization of Ethnic
Groups and the Ethnicization of
Politics: Bosnia, India, Pakistan

By-
Carsten Wieland

In
this comparative study of Muslim nation-building and the so-called ‘ethnic
conflicts’ the author reveals stunning parallels between the collapse of Tito’s
Yugoslavia and the ethno-
national separation of colonial India. In both cases Muslims ended up in a
nation state of their own without the majority of them wanting one. There were
no mass movements that
demanded a new ‘homeland’, which contradicts modernization-theory approaches of
nationalism. Wieland digs below the surface and sketches historic developments
that triggered the construction and instrumentalization of ‘ethnic groups’ in
both cases.

He
concludes that the term ethnicity has lost its academic value because it
suffers from
inconsistencies and strong political implications. ‘Ethnicity’ is not an
existing group of people but a concept of action and political resource
detached from any historic context. The ‘ethnocenter’ varies. In both the
Yugoslavian and the Indian case it was religion around which secondary features
were added as contrast boosters.

Bosnia
and Pakistan were founded under the strong influence of political elites and
external political actors, like the colonial power or the international
community, who themselves through within the ethno-national paradigm and acted
accordingly. This helped to create Muslim nation states despite considerable
contradictions between the political action group and the ‘ethnic group’ they
claimed to represent. While delivering convincing facts and new
perspectives, this book is a passionate appeal for the deconstruction of
‘ethnic’ camps.

Carsten
Wieland
works with the Goethe Institute (Max Müller Bhavan). He was an editor and
correspondent with the German Press-Agency (DPA) in Washington, Tel Aviv,
Hanover and Bogota. As a free-lancer he worked from New Delhi and from the
besieged city of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Wieland studied history, political
science, philosophy, and inter-national reltions at Humboldt University in
Berlin, at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and at Duke University in
North Carolina (USA).

This
timely volume analyses the attitude and orientation of police towards
minorities in India’s plural, democratic, secular society and its behavior
while dealing with them as groups particularly in communal riot situations. The
essays written from diverse socio-cultural perspectives take into account the
expected role of law enforcement agencies in plural democratic societies and
India’s constitutional framework, also how far these agencies have stood up to
that role and deviated from the same.

The
essays take into account the colonial heritage, structure, training and working
conditions of the police agencies to determine their attitude and behavior.
Role of police has not been evaluated in isolation but in the framework of
socio-political structures and processes. The reports of various commission and
studies have also been analyzed and suggestions have been thoroughly examined.
The purpose is not just to condemn the police but to evaluate the system in a
manner which can be used for improving the situation.

Asghar
Ali Engineer
is Chairman, Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai and Director,
Institute of Islamic Studies. He is recipient of several awards including Right
Livelihood Honorary Award and a renowned Human Rights activist and social
reformer.

Amarjit
S. Narang
is Professor of Political Science and coordinator, Human Righs Education at
Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi. He has participated in U.N.
Human Rights Commission sessions for several years and writes extensively on
issues related to Indian Politics, Human Rights and Ethnicity.

Published
in association with Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo

Maritime
boundary of India and Sri Lanka is divided at three different points in
different seas: the Bay of Bengal in the north, the Palk Straits in the middle,
and the Gulf of Mannar in the South. The maximum distance between these two
countries in the Palk Straits is about 45 km. and the minimum distance is
around 16 km. between Dhanushkodi on the Indian side and Thalaimannar on the
Sri Lankan coast. They don’t have Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) in the area.
They have rights over 12 to 22 km. of water. The countries signed bilateral
agreements on the Kachchativu Island in June 1974 and on the maritime boundary
in the Gulf of Mannar and the Bay of Bengal in March 1976. However, there are
some contentious issues between them. The study has analysed the various
maritime issues between India and Sri Lanka.

The
work focuses on the reasonable options available to both countries. It brings
out a new perspective on the problem between a larger and a smaller country.
Moreover, some of the issues in maritime relations directly and indirectly
affect lives of communities in and around the coastal areas. A systematic
analysis of these issues may imporve understanding of the
dynamics of the problems at hand among policy makers, most of whom are largely
disconnected from the ground realities. Such an understanding may help resolve
some of the problems faced by these communities.

Adluri
Subramanyam Raju
is a Honorary Academic Fellow at the Indo-American Centre for International
Studies, Hyderabad and Associate Editor for Indian Ocean Survey. He was
Salzburg Seminar Fellow (2006), recipient of the Mahbub-ul-Haq Award (2003),
Scholar of Peace (2002) and Kodikara Award (1998). He has published five books
and more than a dozen articles.

S.I.
Keethaponcalan
is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Public Policy,
University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. He holds a masters and a doctoral degree in
Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University, Virginia and
Nova Southeastern University, Florida respectively. He has published widely on
issues relating to Sri Lanka and South Asia.

Interrogating Social Development:
Global Perspectives and Local Initiatives

By- Debal K. SinghaRoy

This collection of essays shows
that as the developmental processes have not positively impacted all sections
of the society, due to inherited socio-cultural considerations on the one hand
and the state failure to ensure equity to all its citizen on the other,
pre-existing social imbalances have been reproduced and furthered keeping vast
sections of the population persistently poor, illiterate, in ill-health,
un/underemployed, homeless, voiceless, and vulnerable. Beside elaborating the
dominant perspectives of social development, it also elucidates several
developmental initiatives undertaken among the tribes, dalits, forest dwellers,
women, physically challenged, sex-workers in various parts of the country and
recorded emerging praxes of social development that have emerged from the
grass-roots experiences of cooperative activisms. Self-Help Group initiatives,
corporate social partnerships, interactivity of marginalized communities, and
ICTs interventions.

This collection would be of
immense use to students, researchers, teachers of sociology, political science,
economics, history, public administration, social psychology and development
studies and civil society activists, planners, executives and politicians
dealing with the issues of social development, marginalization and social
exclusion.

Debal K. SinghaRoy is Professor of Sociology, in the Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Indira Gandhi National Open University. He is a recipient of the Australian Government Endeavour Fellowship, 2010.

Eastern India in the Late Nineteenth Century (Part II: 1880s-1890s): Documents on Economic History of British Rule in India, 1858-1947

By- Amiya Kumar Bagchi and Arun Bandopadhyay (eds.)

The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) has recently revived its Major Project on the collection and collation of important documents pertaining to the economic history of British rule in India covering the period 1858-1947. Economic history is taken here in the widest possible meaning of the term, covering data and developments judged significant from the economic, social, cultural ecological history of the country. The present volume is concerned with a wide range of economic documents for Eastern India covered by the Bengal Presidency of British India in the late nineteenth century.

The volume is divided into two parts, Part I (1860s-1870s) and Part II (1880s-1890s). The Part I has been published in 2009. The Part II contains documents on economic history of the region in the last two decades of the nineteenth century when the mark of the new administration of the British Raj was felt by the people in myriad ways. These documents do reflect on the economic conditions of the people in diverse fields, often culminated by the more dramatic presence of scarcity or famines. Accordingly, data are collected from a wide spectrum of human activity reflected in diverse fields such as agriculture, forestry, population, public health, education and sanitation. A considerable part of these documents is presented in statistical forms, particularly connected with Public Health, Agricultural prices and Export–Import trade. In minute details, these documents touch on a wide variety data on agricultural operations, agricultural appliances, material conditions of agricultural classes, population change, health and mortality, literacy and primary education, value of livestock and cattle diseases, production and export of cash crops, production and supply of food grains, distribution of waste lands, forests and reclamation of jungle lands, tenural disputes, and scarcity and famines.

The work is expected to be an important source for students of the history of economic and human development in India.

Amiya Kumar Bagchi is Professor of economics, Director, institute of Development Studies Kolkata and first Chancellor of Tripura Central University.

Arun Bandopadhyay is current Nurul Hasan Professor of History and formerly Dean of the Faculty Council for Postgraduate Studies in Arts at the University of Calcutta.

Eastern India in
the Late Nineteenth Century (Part I: 1860s-1870s): Documents on Economic
History of British Rule in India, 1858-1947

By- Amiya Kumar
Bagchi and Arun Bandopadhyay (Eds.)

The Indian
Council of Historical Research (ICHR) has recently revived its Major Project on
the collection and collation of important documents pertaining to the economic
history of British rule in India covering the period 1858-1947. Economic
history is taken here in the widest possible meaning of the term, covering data
and developments judged significant from the economic, social, cultural
ecological history of the country. The present volume is concerned with a wide
range of economic documents for Eastern India covered by the Bengal Presidency
of British India in the late nineteenth century.

The volume is divided into two parts, Part
I (1860s-1870s) and Part II (1880s-1890s). Part I contains documents on
economic history of the region in the early decades after the administration of
India was taken over from the East India Company by the British Parliament.
These documents display the plight of the people, often culminating in famines
and epidemics. The collected data relate to diverse fields such as agriculture,
forestry, population, public health, education and sanitation. Official data on
agricultural operations, agricultural appliances, material conditions of
agricultural classes, population change, health and mortality, literacy and
primary education, value of livestock and cattle diseases, production and
export of cash crops, production and supply of food grains, distribution of
waste lands, forests and reclamation of jungle lands, tenurial disputes and
demarcation of village lands, are to be found here.

The work is expected to be an important
resource for students of the history of economic and human development of
India.

Amiya Kumar
Bagchi is Professor of economics, Director,
institute of Development Studies Kolkata and first Chancellor of Tripura
Central University.

Arun
Bandopadhyay is current Nurul Hasan Professor of
History and formerly Dean of the Faculty Council for Postgraduate Studies in
Arts at the University of Calcutta.

27 August, 2012

A dazzling new collection of
poems by a remarkably gifted poet whose vision penetrates to unravel, expose
and cauterize the stereotypes in a uniquely individualistic style. Rejecting
formalism of elites these verses appear disarmingly simple, direct but too
often profound and significantly complex to communicate.

Without the danger of stunning
nostalgia there is resistance and reflection and a discernible sociopolitical
consciousness besides a regular reproach of the self whose seemingly endless
search for belonging, and meaning and sanity collides with a disjointed, base,
absurd and insensitive world.

Tender, confessional, joyous,
painful, disturbing, rebellious and provocative, the poems in this volume celebrate
humanity and womanhood in all its complexities.

Aparna Lanjewar Bose (b.
1971) is a trilingual writer, poet, translator and activist. She teaches
English Literature at the Postgraduate teaching department of University of
Mumbai and resides in Mumbai.

The Forgotten Mughals: A History of the Later Emperors of the House
of Babar (1707-1857)

By- G.S. Cheema

A hundred and fifty years lie
between the death of Aurangzeb and the final extinction of the Mughal empire.
In its first hundred and fifty years the empire had seen six rulers, but during
the next century and a half the Qila-i-Mualla would witness the passage of as
many as eleven emperors – if one leaves out the six or seven failed pretenders.
It was a period of violence and disorder, with armies constantly on the march
across a landscape of increasing misery, impoverishment, and desolation. The
Forgotten Mughals is the story of these largely pageant emperors with their
increasingly ineffectual ministers, and their gradual decline into irrelevance
while younger and more powerful forces, both Indian and foreign, grappled with
each other for the mastery of Hindostan.

The landmark events like the wars
of succession, the dictatorship of the Syed brothers, the Nadir Shahi and
Durrani invasions with their attendant horrors, the bloodbath of Panipat and
the final sack of Delhi in 1857 are all covered in detail. The book’s strength
lies in its anecdotal details, like that of young Muhammad Shah, hiding behind
the ample skirts of the formidable Sadr un-Nissa, superintendent of the harem,
and of Bidar Dil cowering in a closet, while the emissaries of Qutb-ul-Mulk
tried, in vain, to convince his women that they had, in fact, come to call him
to the throne. And who will believe
today that, as part of the ‘retributive justice’ of the British, for nearly
twenty years the Zinat masjid in Daryaganj was used as a bakery, and that the
basement of the Fatehpuri mosque was sold to Seth Chuna Mall?

G.S. Cheema was
born in Ranchi and is presently a senior civil servant belonging to the Punjab
cadre of the Indian Administrative Service which he joined in 1972. He lives in
Chandigarh.